With medical degrees from Yale and a growing private practice in a silk-stocking section of San Francisco, you and your husband Richard’s lives seemed to be set … until you chucked it all to care instead for the uninsured, estimated to comprise one quarter of the city. Your founding of the San Francisco Free Clinic began as a personal response to the growing pile of paperwork swamping American health care. And the Victorian building you converted in the Richmond District quickly grew inco a center providing family care to thousands of patients, who pay only what they can. Since they are the city’s working poor and unemployed, most pay nothing . Who would have thought you would raise enough private funds to support the clinic’s half a million dollar annual expenses? And who would have thought you would convince hundreds of physicians and other health care professionals to volunteer their services, longing, it turned out, to experience at least for a time a liberation from paperwork and the satisfaction of providing care where it is most needed? In addition to treating and counseling patients yourself, you are expanding the base of fellow practitioners by training medical students and residents in care for the poor. “The San Francisco Free Clinic is like a community treasure,” says the Executive Director of the San Francisco Medical Society. The California Academy of Family Practice has named you and Richard Family Physicians of the Year and you have won the Bay Area HIV Prevention Award. Could it possibly be true that you are also the mother of five? All of this grew from your simple idea, which we all can heartily applaud, that “doctors don’t need more bureaucracy; they need to practice medicine.
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